Edward Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax

Edward Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax (16 April 1881-23 December 1959) was Governor-General of British India from 3 April 1926 to 18 April 1931 (succeeding Rufus Isaacs and preceding Freeman Freeman-Thomas) and Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom from 21 February 1938 to 22 December 1940 (interrupting Anthony Eden's two terms). A Conservative Party politician, Halifax was a leading proponent of peace talks with the Axis Powers in the early years of World War II, making him rivals with the stalwart Winston Churchill.

Biography
Edward Wood was born in Powderham Castle, Devon, England in 1881. He was educated at Eton and Oxford before being elected to Parliament in 1910 for the Conservative Party to represent Ripon. He served in World War I as a cavalry officer. Wood was made President of the Board of Education under Bonar Law in 1922, and he was Minister of Agriculture in Stanley Baldwin's second government from 1924. In 1926, he was sent to India as viceroy, having been given the title of Lord Irwin. It was this name that he gave to the famous "Irwin Declaration" of 1929, making concessions to the increasingly active Indian nationalists by announcing a Round Table Conference to discuss India's future, and pledging that Britain aimed to give India dominion status. He also agreed to negotiate with Mahatma Gandhi, whom he had imprisoned after the Salt March. He was replaced as viceroy in 1931, and he became Chancellor of Oxford University in 1933. He had returned to the government in 1932, partly to assist its Indian reforms, and eventually became Foreign Secretary in 1938. In that post, he was a noted advocate of appeasement, accepting the Anschluss of Nazi Germany and Austria, and the separation of the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia following the Munich Agreement. In 1939, he refused an invitation to Moscow, and thus lost any chance of concluding an anti-German agreement with the Soviet Union. He supported Neville Chamberlain's view in September 1939 that there was no alternative to war. Despite King George's preference for him, he did not form a government in May 1940 since he did not command the support of the Conservative Party, which opted for Winston Churchill instead. He was ambassador to the United States from 1941 to 1946,  and he died in Garrowby Hall, Yorkshire in 1959 at the age of 78.